Many years ago, I worked at a convenience store. One day I was sweeping up the parking lot and my boss, who owned a small chain of four stores, walked up. He saw a few pennies on the ground and he asked me if I was going to pick them up. I said, “No, it’s just a few cents.” My boss reached down and scooped up the pennies and while sticking them in his pocket, he said, “That’s why I own all these stores and why you just work at this store.”
J.D. Rockefeller once made the coopers at Standard Oil justify the number of nails they used in making oil barrels. He stood in the shop and forced them try different configurations until they were able to make a stable barrel using two fewer nails in each barrel. The savings for the two nails multiplied by all the barrels they made over the years ran into the millions. He called it the fortune he saved.